How to Organize the Pantry

Because a disorganized kitchen pantry is often a nightmare for the home cook, having an organized and clutter-free pantry can be a relief. As such, you may have envied and longed to have one of those gloriously organized pantries featured on cooking shows. Fortunately, turning your cluttered kitchen pantry into a storage dream is not as tough as most of us think it is. Having a system to re-stock your pantry when necessary and knowing where your go-to items are will often prove helpful.

Pantry organization comes with a variety of benefits, from making the preparation of home-cooked meals easy and more enjoyable to giving you better control over your grocery bills and space utilization. Aside from keeping clutter down and helping you determine which snacks are easier for your children to grab in a hurry, having an organized kitchen pantry will most likely save you a significant amount of money. Here are a few creative ideas, tips, and products to help you organize the pantry.

Declutter
Decluttering is the first step to organizing your pantry, which is why you must commit to having a clutter-free pantry. Getting to every foodstuff and ingredient will be a lot easier if you eliminate the need to shuffle around clutter. Less clutter saves you money by helping to ensure you do not buy duplicates, which reduces the likelihood of spoilt and wasted food. It saves you time by allowing you to find what you need quickly, which makes getting dinner on the table a lot faster.

Empty the pantry of everything, food and storage containers included. Make sure you remove all the accumulated trash and junk. Starting with the highest shelf, dust the entire pantry and wipe down each shelf. To start the sorting process, line up every item in one space so that you can see them all at once. In this way, you can spot duplicates and spoiled foods easily and get a sense of how much space you will need for every type of foodstuff. Assess every item one-by-one and throw out whatever you don’t like or use, and anything that has expired.

Arrange the items
Although lining your foodstuff by size and height might make visual sense, it often isn’t the best organizing scheme. Instead of basing your arrangement on size, try to organize your pantry by groups. Spices, grains, snacks, and oils are some of the most common groups. Apart from looking logical, this type of arrangement makes a lot of sense for cooking. For instance, you can have all you need to make a salad dressing occupying the same space in your pantry by grouping together champagne, apple cider, rice wine, balsamic, olive and grape oil, white cooking wine, and olive oil spray.

Arranging the items at the right height should be the next step. Keep what you use most regularly as high as your shoulders and as low as your knees. Items kept in this space are a lot easier to reach and put back after use. Because they are usually heavy, it might be best to store what you buy in bulk at the bottom of the pantry. Additionally, you will have to reach for the snacks if you place them high up.

Choose the right storage solutions
Although proper kitchen pantry organization does not necessarily call for the aid of any storage solution, the right options can come in handy when you’re struggling for additional space. Some household items offer smart and inexpensive ways of adding more storage to your pantry.

You can use stackable containers to store items like pasta, oats, rice, beans, sugar, and flour in plain sight. Because these containers are ideally designed for modular stacking, they can make storage a snap. Besides, stackable containers provide an airtight seal, which makes them ideal for food storage. Heavy-duty, multi-purpose sheet pans are also good organizers. Aside from making it easy to group similar ingredients, they’re also an excellent way of containing inadvertent leaks or spills. Because easy view pantry organizers make your food visible, using this type of storage solution allows you to find what you want instantly and know what needs purchasing. As such, they can keep you from duplicating what you already have.

Maintain an organized pantry
Even when you do not have the time required for a full cleanup and overhaul, the smallest effort might still make a huge difference. To maintain the new level of organization, you must keep your kitchen pantry clean and tidy. You should go through your pantry to eliminate clutter on a regular basis. Regardless of whether you have a huge closet or a single shelf pantry, this process involves easy tasks and requires a few minutes to complete.

Face all the labels outward: Telling what you already have in stock might not be easy if you cannot see the labeling, which is why you need to face them all out. You can enhance visibility by stacking similar items on top of each other.
Group similar items together: Regrouping the like items together allows you to find and grab every ingredient you need without having to dig through several shelves.

Wipe down the shelves: As basic as it may seem, using a damp rag to wipe down your pantry is an important maintenance step since pantries often accumulate a light coat of flour, dust, and other debris.

Check expiration dates: Open packages do not usually have the same luxury as canned goods. Make sure you check every item’s expiry date and throw out whatever has expired.

Depending on the size of your pantry and how often you cook, it might be best to remove clutter on a daily or weekly basis, re-group items on a monthly basis, and re-fit your storage solutions seasonally. In this manner, you won’t have to repeat the process of emptying and cleaning your pantry. Remember, the more often you free your pantry of clutter, the less time you will need to complete this process in the future.